My colleague and friend Pat Pinsent, a Catholic feminist and educator, who has died aged 90, will be remembered for her integrity, kindness and sharp intelligence, as well as for her eccentricities.
Pat taught for many years (1967-98) at Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, now the University of Roehampton, south-west London, in the education and English literature departments, running a centre for young people’s reading development in the former, and acting as a mainstay of the children’s literature MA in the latter.
Her notable publications include Language, Culture and Young Children: Developing English in the Multi-Ethnic Nursery and Infant School (1992) and Children’s Literature and the Politics of Equality (1997). She was awarded a PhD by publication from the University of Surrey in 1999.
Pat was born in Deal, Kent, where her parents, Daisy (nee Hills) and John Lock, ran the house of a retired Greek stockbroker. She went to St Ethelburga’s, a local Catholic school, and from the age of 16 boarded at the Sacred Heart convent school in Wealdstone, north-west London. She studied maths at Bedford College, University of London, before training to be a teacher at Cavendish Square Catholic college.
After a brief spell of teaching in Norwich, she worked for the aircraft manufacturers Handley Page, where she met Henry Pinsent, a mathematician; they were married in 1958. In 1960 Pat switched her focus from maths to English literature, juggling bringing up three small children and studying for two English degrees, before taking up a post at Roehampton.
It is not just Pat’s work there that will live on. So, too, will her unforgettable personality. I have vivid memories of a journey to a conference in Naples with Pat in 2008. When a security official found traces of nitroglycerin in her luggage, Pat responded indignantly to all questions as to whether she had been in contact with lawn fertiliser, golf balls or heart medication (“Do you have a heart condition, Madam?” “No, but I shall have now”).
Once in Naples, Pat did not hesitate to ask Italian waiters for cups of hot water for the dried-out teabags she always carried in her handbag – why use them only once? Yet she did, of course, deliver an impressive paper at the Naples Philosophical Society.
Pat was devoted to her family. When Henry developed dementia, she read to him on a daily basis. Typically, Pat did not let this successful strategy rest there, but suggested it to others in an article for a journal on dementia; she also went on to write a children’s book, Life With Grandpa (2018), detailing the dementia of a grandparent from a child’s point of view.
Throughout her life, Pat was sustained by her faith. She was a co-founder of the Catholic Women’s Network, and lived in the hope of seeing the ordination of women in the Catholic church and the election of a female pope.
Henry died in 2016. She is survived by her daughter, Frances, and son, Mark, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Another son, Bernard, predeceased her.
